Lately, I've been reading What Are People For? (1990 North Point Press, San Francisco. ISBN 0865474206), a collection of essays by philosopher, poet, framer, and teacher Wendell Berry.  It was on my reading list ever since I ran across a one of his quotes from the essay "The Responsibility of the Poet".  Here's the original quote along with some of my thoughts and a couple of other snippets.

It has seemed to me increasingly that a poem -- a good poem -- exists at the center of a complex remembering, to which it relates as both cause and effect. (pg. 88)

Berry also has a great passage about how poetry and all art can be fundamentally missional:

By its formal integrity a poem reminds us of the formal integrity of other works, creatures, and structures of the world....Thus the poet affirms and collaborates in the formality of Creation. (pg. 89)

It's intriguing to me how unimpressed Berry is with the progress of our modern times in general.  For exmple, he compares the creation of poetry to "love" and says that it must be "amateur work" as opposed to "professional" (89-90).  His skepticism of professionalism seems to be routed in his feelings that the Consumer-Industrial Complex is dehumanizing everything, turning all human interactions into transactions.  Poetry done well is a champion in that it cannot be used in such a system:

...it cannot be written or understood by anyone thinking of praise or publication or promotion. (pg. 90)

According to Berry, the problem is not to be "original" in the modern sense, but to so perform the art that it causes "its history to resound and sing around it", so waking us from our "sleep" by its reverberations (90).  Now I like the sound of that.

PHOTO: David Marshall (http://davidaaronmarshall.com), from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wberry.jpg Creative Commons 2.0 Share-Alike.